Zed Unveils AI-Powered Coding Assistant with Claude 3.5 Integration

Introducing Zed AI: Zed, a company known for its expertise in text manipulation and editor development, has launched Zed AI, a hosted service that integrates AI-powered coding assistance into their text editor.

Key features and collaborations:

• Zed AI is powered by Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet language model, offering AI-enabled coding support within the Zed editor.
• The collaboration with Anthropic arose from mutual interest, with Anthropic engineers recognizing the value of Zed’s text-centric interface.
• Zed has implemented Anthropic’s Prompt Caching beta, resulting in faster responses and reduced costs, even with large amounts of code in the context window.
• The service is currently available for free during the initial launch period.

Core components of Zed AI:

• Assistant Panel: A full-fledged text editor that exposes the entire LLM request, allowing users to observe, edit, and refine any part of the interaction.
• Slash Commands: A system to populate the context with various types of information, including file contents, terminal output, and diagnostic information.
• Inline Transformations: Allows code transformation and generation using natural language prompts, with a custom streaming diff protocol for real-time feedback.

Unique aspects of Zed AI:

• Transparency: Users have full visibility and control over the AI prompts and context.
• Extensibility: Slash commands can be extended via WebAssembly or a JSON-based context server protocol.
• Integration: The assistant panel and inline transformations work together, allowing for iterative refinement of prompts and context.

Future developments:

• Workflows for Complex Transformations: The /workflow command will enable AI-guided, multi-step code transformations across project files.
• Context Management Tools: Features like /project and /auto are being developed to help users efficiently gather and manage relevant context for AI interactions.

Community involvement: Zed encourages users to experiment with the platform, create custom slash commands, and contribute to the open-source codebase.

Broader implications: Zed AI represents a significant step in AI-assisted development, offering a transparent and extensible environment that puts developers in control of AI interactions. This approach could potentially shape the future of coding tools, balancing the power of AI with the need for developer agency and understanding.